Speed Reading Returns

Apps and Classes Help People Adapt to Reading on Their Phones

People read more than ever on mobile devices and usually in 10-minute bursts, giving rise to a new wave of apps that promise to make reading on a small screen easier. Angela Chen reports on the News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

By

Angela Chen

March 26, 2014 7:00 p.m. ET

Reading these days is often a few minutes on the phone in the grocery-store line, not an hour curled up with a book on the couch. This quick-hit reading is sparking a renewed interest in the art of speed reading.

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People read more than ever on mobile devices and usually in 10-minute bursts, according to research by e-reading subscription services. To tap into this, there's a revival in traditional speed-reading classes as well as new apps that promise to make reading on a small screen easier.

When Brett Kirby, age 33, reads the news in the morning, he doesn't grab a newspaper or browse a website. He picks up his phone and has his articles flashed to him, one word at a time, 650 words a minute.

Mr. Kirby, a research fellow in medicine at Duke University, is a beta-tester for Spritz, a mobile app that claims to help people read faster without the bother of classes.

Promises of blazing through "War and Peace" have been around since the Evelyn Wood speed-reading classes of the 1960s, and demand for in-person classes is growing, says Paul Nowak, founder of Iris Reading LLC, a Chicago-based company that hosts similar courses. Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, based in Mission, Kan., still offers workshops, DVDs and other resources, though it is smaller than its heyday. (Calls to its offices weren't returned.)

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Spritz promises to help people read faster. The app flashes words at users at a speed of their choosing.
Spritz

Spritz Technology Inc. co-founder and CEO Frank Waldman says using the app is a more modern way of reading. The company's goal isn't to help undergraduates cram for exams, he says, but to change how people keep up with mobile news. "You wouldn't really want to read classic lit or Shakespeare on [Spritz]," he says. "We want to work on focused reading on the go." Samsung Group's new Galaxy S5 phone and Gear 2 smartwatch come with the Spritz app preloaded.

The average college graduate reads about 250 words a minute, says Michael Masson, professor of psychology at the University of Victoria in Canada. A 7-year-old reads about 80 words a minute, while a sixth-grader reads about 185 words a minute. People who use Velocity, a $2.99 iPhone and iPad app that launched in September tend to go with its default speed of 300 words a minute, says the app's co-creator Matthew Bischoff. But 400 and 500 words a minute are also popular presets.

Spritz says its studies show people who were reading 250 words a minute sped up to reading 400 words a minute after using Spritz for 20 minutes with no loss in comprehension.

Can you really boost your reading speed so much so quickly? Going from 250 to 400 isn't beyond the realm of possibility, says Dr. Masson. But in general, comprehension gets worse the faster people read, he says.

In a 1987 seminal study on speed reading, Dr. Masson tested the text comprehension of three groups: people reading at a normal speed (about 240 words a minute); people skimming at 600 words a minute; and people who had taken an Evelyn Wood course and read through the text at 700 words a minute. (The three groups read on a TV monitor.)

The skimmers and speed-readers did much worse at answering comprehension questions afterward, especially ones about specifics or technical material. "One can have the impression of being able to immediately identify what those words are, but if they are going by at such a high rate, it's virtually impossible" to come away with coherent ideas from the text, Dr. Masson says.

Mobile speed-reading apps use "rapid serial visual presentation," or RSVP, in which words are flashed on the screen at a preset rate. The technology is based on the premise that a lot of reading time is wasted by moving our eyes back and forth.

RSVP hurts comprehension because it doesn't let people look back at previous words, says Keith Rayner, a psychology professor at the University of California-San Diego. In a study he co-authored, 40 college students read passages at their natural pace and also while using a technology that didn't allow them to refer back. In the first trial, subjects had 75% comprehension accuracy. In the second trial, they had only 50% accuracy.

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Last year, nearly two million people participated in Iris's in-person courses, compared with 417,000 in 2012 and 22,517 in 2007, when the company began.

The company teaches a three-step process involving "preview" (look at headings and subheads for main ideas), "overview" (read the first sentence of every paragraph") and "read" (go from beginning to end, but only if the previous two steps have convinced you the article is worth reading).

None of this is possible using an RSVP app. In 2010, Iris launched its own free RSVP app, AccelaReader. "People still have to read on the printed page or on a full screen, so people need to know how to read well in both situations," Mr. Nowak says.

San Francisco-based startup Plympton Inc. has a different solution for people reading in short bursts on their phone. In March, Plympton launched its first iPhone app, the $4.99-a-month Rooster subscription service. Rooster can send users a 15-minute chunk of a novel—selected every month by Rooster's team—each day. (The 15-minute chunk is calculated using an average speed of about 200 words a minute.) Upcoming selections include "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy.

Rooster's approach is designed to make the thought of starting a book more appealing, says Yael Goldstein Love, Rooster's editorial director and a novelist.

Readers can choose to read on to the next installment if they've finished their 15-minute daily read. "You can binge read," Ms. Goldstein Love says. " 'Binge read' sounds like a funny thing to say because that was how we read normally, but people no longer feel like they have time to read a 300-page thing."

Your teacher was probably correct when you were younger. Another thing that slows you down is what they call sub-vocalization, meaning unconsciously sounding out the words as you read. Note a faster talker might speak 250 WPM, so listening to books is an not the same as speed reading. The goal of using your finger in the Evelyn Wood method is to do this as speed drills and constantly move your finger faster while maintaining comprehension. Buy a book on the subject and spends some hours practicing and you will see results. If you can double your reading speed and maintain comprehension think of the hours you will save (or the increased volume of reading in the same time period). Good luck.

After about 7 years in the workforce I decided to begin studying for the CFA designation. I quickly discovered there would be a lot of reading required, especially once I considered the background studying I had to do to refresh myself on college accounting knowledge I had long since forgotten. At that point I searched for speed reading options and found an Evelyn Woods instructor. I convinced a friend to join me in the training class to reduce the cost. I have to say this course was a life changing event. I was able to read complex accounting, finance and economics textbooks at speeds averaging 450 wpm. As far as comprehension, that was not a problem as I passed all three levels on the first attempt. I thought to myself I wish I had these skills in high school and college. The point with Evelyn Woods is you prep yourself by reviewing the book - front and back, table of contents, etc. Then most people read every single word. That's what people don't realize. The master speed readers can scan whole sentences, paragraphs or even pages, but I read each word. The secret is you use your finger(s) to pull your eye forward more quickly than your natural pace. So your finger sets the pace and your eyes follow. With practice you can be quite fast. With lighter subjects speeds of 500 - 500 WPM are possible. The challenge in the digital age is reading on a screen where you cannot use your finger. With a computer flashing words on a screen you cannot easily go back. With speed reading on a printed page, you move your finger backwards and review that line again. Very simple, very fast and really an important skill to maximize your time. And yes, you can speed read novels and enjoy them. Once you are practiced in the skill, it comes naturally and just works. I plan on teaching my children this skill soon, certainly before they leave elementary school.

During my senior year at Grosse Pointe (Michigan) high school in 1954-55 I seized the opportunity to enroll in a "speed reading" course taught by a visiting University of Michigan professor (of what, I have no idea) who arrived with a machine called a tachistoscope. The class assembled in a darkened room while the machine flashed words on a screen for a 50th of a second. We began with single words, then two or three word combiinations, whole sentences, whole paragraphs and finally whole pages. We had no choice but to swallow written messages whole, so to be summarily examined on what they said. After a while, we developed quite astonishingly accurate comprehension. Mostly what I learned is that one reads at varying speeds as may be appropriate. We all read newspapers hurriedly. One can't rush the poets quickly, and can't hurry Mark Twain, but today I can read most things with about the speed that I turn pages. When I can see that a writer is dawdling, I speed him up. Yes; one can judge a book by its cover, and by its table of contents, its key words. -Kenneth Reed, Ph..D.

I love to read, and I never quite got the idea of 'speed reading' unless I was trying to get through something I really wasn't enjoying but that I had to understand. Trying to read as fast as you can for leisure seems like it's taking an enjoyable and even meditative activity and turning it into a stressful binge.

For most well-informed readers, more than 80% of non-fiction that is presented to you - i.e., information in newspapers, magazines and many non-fiction books - is stuff you already have read dozens of times, and is basically filler. If you want to move quickly through a document, look for what you don't know and skip what you know you do.

"The technology is based on the premise that a lot of reading time is wasted by moving our eyes back and forth." So wouldn't it be better to have your smartphone convert the individual words of a body of text, like a Wall Street Journal article, into speech? I'm sure people who are profoundly visually impaired (blind) have an app for that.

We had something like that in my HS years of '66-'70, only the device sat on your desk and scrolled a line of light down the pages. The alternative was making a "hook 'em Horns" sign with your index and little fingers and manually - digitally? - scrolling down. Either way, it was wasted on us Reading Group I/AP English types, who bewailed it for ruining the joy of reading, which we'd already acquired. Like many educafads, the program wasn't last continued much longer after we were graduated.

I was taught speed reading as part of an experiment when I was in Jr High School and has come in handly when reading some long winded department head's reports. Of course, long, boring reports would be much easier to comprehend if the writer would simply say what they mean. No one cares how you did it...just that it got done.

If you use the app they are talking about and read at 500 wpm and try saying it aloud at the same pace you will realize that it's just not possible to have a person or machine pronounce the words anywhere near as quickly. It really is amazing how fast your brain can process the words visually.

John, an interesting post. Apps that convert written text into speech are available as are audible books. As to books that are available to the blind, how many words per minute do the readers speak? Can these readers be speeded up and still be comprehended?

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